1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a control system for an automotive vehicle for controlling vehicular driving behavior. More specifically, the invention relates to a vehicle driving control system which tactically combining non-human control which is performed purely depending upon vehicular driving parameters reflecting vehicular driving condition and/or vehicular environmental condition and human control which is performed with taking driver's driving characteristics, feeling, tendency and so forth into account.
2. Description of the Background Art
In the modern automotive technologies, various vehicular driving control systems have been proposed and developed in order to optimize vehicular driving performance and behavior. Many of such control systems monitors vehicular driving condition and vehicular driving environmental condition for depending thereupon. Such type of control derives control signals purely depending upon the monitored vehicle driving condition and environmental condition and according to preprogrammed and rigidly set control schedule irrespective of the driver's driving characteristics, feeling, tendency and other human feeling factor. Therefore, such type of control will be referred to as "non-human control". On the other hand, according to progress of computer technologies, there have been developed fuzzy computer, neuron computer, artificial intelligence (AI) computer and so forth. Such advanced computer technologies enables to automotive control systems to perform control operations not only depending upon vehicle driving condition and vehicular environmental condition but also depending upon driver's driving characteristics, tendency, feeling and so forth. Such type of control will be hereafter referred to as "human control".
For example, Japanese Patent First (unexamined) Publication (Tokkai) Heisei 1-167434 discloses a throttle control system for an automotive internal combustion engine, in which a throttle valve angular position is controlled in response to depression of an accelerator pedal. The disclosed control system recognizes vehicular driving environmental condition, such as hill climbing, heavy traffic road and so forth, and selects one of a plurality of control characteristics maps depending upon the vehicular driving environmental condition. Map look-up is performed against the selected one of map in terms of the operational magnitude of the accelerator pedal. The shown system further predict the driver's will of vehicular behavior, acceleration and deceleration characteristics, e.g. swift acceleration, moderate acceleration, according to driver's accelerator control behavior.
Though such advanced vehicle control systems have obtained certain gain to make the vehicular driving behavior closer to the ideal or optimum behavior. However, on the other hand, the control systems proposed in the prior art have not been completely satisfactory. Particularly, since the prior proposed system have non-human control and human control mixingly. It required another logic for governing interrelation between the non-human control and the human control. The conventional control system requires substantial cost in development of control programs. Further to say, the conventionally developed control systems have been generally based on the traditional non-human control logic and taken the human factor as correction parameters for make the control characteristics close to the driver's feeling. For accomplishing this, logic of control had to be established with taking all parameters both for non-human control and human control. In order to establish correction pattern for human control, lots of experiments has to be made and the result of such experiments had to be reflected. Therefore, despite of the extensive effort in establishing the correction pattern, the established correction pattern cannot be satisfactorily adapted for all driver's driving characteristics.
Furthermore, in the prior proposed systems, there is a tendency to arise inconsistency between non-human control and human control. In order to manage such inconsistency and govern control system, another logic for selecting one of non-human or human control becomes necessary. This clearly increases cost for designing and developing the control system.